Inspiration
Twitter's innovative technologies inspired us to learn and develop using their platform, as well as use this technology to try new ways of sharing trending topics on Twitter.
What it does
A 2D Side-Scroller where Larry the twitter bird has to avoid a randomly generated obstacle course to survive. These obstacles are created from twitter's most popular hashtags at the moment the application is set to run. At the moment of losing due to a collision with one of the objects, the enemy hashtag that defeated the player is then shown to them through the players web browser.
How I built it
We used the Java library known as Slick2D in order to create the Side-Scroller. The Twitter REST API is used in order to find the most popular hashtags currently being used in various regions, which are then randomly generated as obstacles within the game. In order to implement the Twitter API in our Java code, we use the open source library known as Twitter4J to carry out the requests to the API.
Challenges I ran into
We ran into issues with the hitboxes of our obstacles, as well managing the amount of times we generate requests to the API in order to avoid reaching our request limit at any moment.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We were able to create the game with all of the core functionality desired, and have an innovative use of Twitter's technology both for entertainment and getting to know new topics being discussed on Twitter.
What I learned
We learned not just about how to use the Twitter API, but also how to use and manage API's in general.
What's next for HashtagRunner
We hope to further develop HashtagRunner, possibly learning how to implement as web and moblie applications. We also plan to further personalize the experience for the user playing the game.
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